I’ve worked on major website redesigns, and there’s so much more to it than just refreshing a few screens. A big redesign is kind of like making a 90min film that costs over $100 million. What you see on the surface is only a small part of the effort. Behind every large website there are teams of experts and consultants. $96 million sounds like a lot, but so is the amount of work required to build or rebuild a site at that scale. It’s easy for people who aren’t familiar with the process to guess what it "should" cost, but without understanding the complexity, those guesses are usually way off. And of course, technology and tech workers are expensive. Sometimes even the initial consulting can run close to a million+ dollars.

Every now and then, we see a post on HN where someone claims they've recreated a well-known website in a short time. But they really haven’t. What they’ve done is copy a handful of screens and maybe a couple of data flows that work for a few test users with no fault tolerance, security, or scalability. Building or updating a hardened, website is far more difficult and far more expensive than anything a small team can spin up quickly. It's expensive and time consuming. Was there some small waste? Yes, I almost guarantee it. But fraud? $96m is a lot of money but without understanding the work that's gone into it, there's no way to know if there was fraud in the cost.